“Never give up,” Juhani said seriously. “Things may get better. Things have got better for you, have they not?”
“They have,” Fernao admitted. “It would have been difficult for them to get worse.” He reached for his crutches. As he did so, he tried to imagine making quick, complex passes with his newly freed arm. He laughed quietly. He couldn’t do it, not to save his life. Then he dipped his head to the physician as he levered himself to his feet. “My thanks, mistress. And what do I owe you for your services?”
When she told him, he blinked. He would have paid twice as much in Setubal. Everything was cheaper in Yliharma, but few things were so much cheaper. Seeing his surprise, she said, “My husband serves the Seven Princes. How can I enrich myself off someone who has already met the foe?”
“I can think of plenty of people who would have no trouble whatever,” Fernao replied as he steadied himself on his crutches. “Honor is where you find it. I hope your husband stays safe.”
He swung out to the street, pausing in the doorway to pull the hood on his tunic up over his head. A chilly drizzle was falling; on the other side of the Vaatojarvi Hills, from what Pekka said, it would be snow. As far as Fernao was concerned, rain was bad enough. Anything that made the sidewalks slippery was bad. He kept fearing he would fall.
He planted his crutches and his good foot with great care. Kuusamans on the sidewalk gave way before him when they saw he had trouble getting around. That never would have happened in Setubal. There, anyone who couldn’t keep up with the bustling throngs was liable to get run down and trampled. He had no trouble flagging a cab. The driver helped him get inside, again more considerate than a Lagoan would have been. “Where to?” the fellow asked.
That was another phrase Fernao had learned. “The Principality,” he replied. Grandmaster Pinhiero had grumbled about paying for his stay there, but yielded in the end. Fernao couldn’t very well impose on Ilmarinen (as far as he could tell, no one imposed on Ilmarinen) or Siuntio, and Pekka was staying at the Principality. The more he learned from the Kuusaman mages, the more he talked shop with them, the better off Lagoas would be. So he’d told the grandmaster, and he’d actually made Pinhiero believe it.
Several hostels in Setubal might have matched the Principality, but Fernao wasn’t sure any could have beaten it. The room in which he dwelt was large and luxurious; the food, even in wartime, was outstanding; and he was convinced that at least half the people who worked in the Principality spoke better Lagoan than he did. The doorman was one of those. “Let me give you a hand, sir,” he said, and helped Fernao up the stairs to the entrance. Going along on flat ground, Fernao thought he managed pretty well. When he had to climb stairs, he was glad for any help he could get.
Once he made it into the lobby, he flipped back the hood on his tunic and sighed with pleasure, enjoying the warmth that radiated from several coal stoves. He looked around, wondering whether any of his Kuusaman colleagues were around. He’d thought he might spot Siuntio or Ilmarinen, but didn’t- though he wouldn’t say they weren’t there till he made a trip to the bar.
He’d taken a couple of hitching steps in that direction when someone called his name. He stopped and looked around-and there sat Pekka, not far from one of the stoves. She waved to him. “Come and join me, if you care to,” she said in classical Kaunian.
“I would be very glad to,” he answered.
She had a skein of dark green yarn in her lap and a length of finished green cloth into which were inserted a pair of crocheting hooks. “If I am not the worst crocheter in the world, I pity the poor woman who is,” Pekka said. “Would you care for a muffler, Master Fernao? You had better say aye, for I cannot make anything else.”
“Aye, and thank you,” Fernao said. “If I asked you for something with sleeves, you would probably knit me to death with those things.”
“Knitting needles are different,” Pekka said. “I knit even worse than I crochet, which is why I do not knit at all anymore.” She pointed to his newly freed arm. “I leave knitting to you. And I am glad to see you are doing it well.”
Reminded of the arm, he scratched it. “A very able lady physician named Juhani took off the cast. You Kuusamans worry less about the differences between men and women than my people do.”
Pekka shook her head. “No, that is not so,” she answered. “We worry less about differences in what men and women do than most other folk. We know there are differences between men and women.” She smiled. “If there were not, the world would have ended a long time ago, or at least our place in it.”
“That is true enough.” Fernao smiled, too.
Pekka rolled her eyes. “I wonder what my son is doing now, down in Kajaani. Something to drive my sister mad, I have no doubt. And, speaking of the differences between men and women, I never behaved that way when I was seven years old.”
“No?” Fernao’s chuckle threatened to become a belly laugh. “Would your mother and father say the same thing about you?”
“I hope so!” Pekka exclaimed. “Their hair is still almost altogether dark. Mine, I think, will be white as snow by the time Uto grows to manhood.”
Fernao ran a hand through his own coppery hair, which was just beginning to be frosted with gray. “I have no children,” he said. “If my hair turns white overnight, it may be on account of what you Kuusamans have come up with.”
“That might do it to me, too.” Before saying anything more, Pekka looked around to see if anyone might be listening. So did Fernao. He spotted no one close by. Pekka couldn’t have, either, but she went on, “I mislike speaking of this in public. Shall we talk further in my rooms?”
To a Lagoan, that might have been an invitation of one sort or an invitation of another sort altogether. Fernao asked, “What would your husband say if he heard you asking me there?”
“He would say that he trusted me,” Pekka answered. “He would also say that he had reason to trust me. I presume you would not try to prove him wrong?”
“Now that you have spoken so, of course not,” Fernao said. “But I did wonder. Customs differ from one kingdom to another.”
“So they do. But I am telling you how things are here.”
“I said all right once,” Fernao replied, not sure whether to be annoyed or amused. “If you do not believe me, take back the invitation.”
“If I did not believe you, Master Fernao, I would do more than take back the invitation.” Pekka sounded sterner than he’d thought she could. “I would do everything I could to have you sent back to Setubal. And I think I could do it.” Her smile had iron in it-no, she wasn’t a woman of the sort Fernao was used to dealing with. She got up. “But now, if you will come with me, we can go up to my rooms-and talk of business.”
Where Pinhiero grumbled about paying the price of a room at the Principality, the Seven Princes had installed Pekka in a suite far larger than the flat Fernao called his own back in Setubal. He said, “With all this, why did you bother coming down to the lobby at all?”
“I get lonely, in here with nothing to look at but the walls,” Pekka answered. “I would rather see open country, as I do out behind my house down in Kajaani, but even the lobby and the street are better than … walls.”
Fernao thought nothing of looking at the walls of his own flat for days on end. Hostel lobbies and city streets were his natural habitat, as was true of any native of Setubal. As for open country, he’d seen more than he’d ever wanted in the land of the Ice People. The only thing he could say about it was that he hadn’t quite died there.
He didn’t want to say anything at all about the land of the Ice People. Instead, he did talk of business: “If the implications of your experiments are what they seem to be, as Ilmarinen says-”
“Even if they are, I do not think we can exploit them,” Pekka said, and now she sounded even more angry than she had when she’d warned what she would do if she didn’t trust him. “I do not think memory can be conserved; I am not at all convinced physical existence can be conserved. The amount of energy released inclines me to doubt it.”
“How could we make an experiment to test that?” Fernao asked.
“Do we not have more obviously urgent things to do?” Pekka returned.
“More obvious? Certainly,” Fernao said. “More urgent? I do not know. Do you?” After a bit of thought, Pekka shook her head. She was honest. Maybe that was why she insisted on honesty from him.
